Arrival in Jacksonville

After navigating the Brazilian bureaucracy, the cars embarked on the Tokio Highway at the Port of Santos, Brazil towards the Port of Jacksonville, Florida.

Forty five days later, ship and the cars arrived safely in Jacksonville on April 9, 2004. The USDA and Customs inspectors inspected and released the cars and the shipping company called us on the 15th to go to Jacksonville. On April 16th my wife and I drove a Dollar rental car up from Miami to Jacksonville.

After negotiating Jacksonville traffic and confusing street signs, we finally arrived at the Customs Office. There, we performed all paperwork steps and cleared the cars in less than 15 minutes.

With Customs clearance form in hand, we proceeded to the port, some 15 miles away. At the shipyard we again met with efficient professionals: we had our cars released in less than 10 minutes.

We finally had our two Pumas. The next challenge at that point was to have both legalized in the U.S. In order to do that we needed to go to the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in Jacksonville.

But, by now we had three cars in our hands. So, we left the rental car at the shipyard parking lot and drove both Pumas to the DMV some 20 miles away.

At the DMV we needed to have the cars inspect and all Brazilian documents, customs, EPA and DOT release forms verified. In order to accomplish that, we needed a DMV inspector that knew how to do the job (apparently, the people at the DMV in Jacksonville are not accustomed to doing this sort of thing).

Finally, one inspector verified all documents and both cars' VIN numbers and gave us an affidavit demonstrating that the cars were indeed inspected and both VIN numbers were correct.

Affidavit and all other papers in hand, the inspector advised us to go to a tag agency not far from the DMV. That would save us time because the DMV office was pretty busy that day.

Indeed, at the tag agency all was accomplished in less than 30 minutes. At around 4:00PM and after paying all the required fees and taxes, our Pumas had new Florida licence plates in place and their respective American titles.

We drove to a motel, left one Puma there and went back to the dock to get the rental car and return it to Dollar.

Unfortunately we have no pictures of these events, with all the rush and concern to get all done on time (it was a Friday). But we managed to have it all done before 4:00PM.

The pictures below were taken at our motel in Jacksonville and during the trip back to Sunny Isles Beach on Sunday the 18th.